Teddy Edwards turned up and climbed my tree without asking, but the sun made me warm and a bit floppy, and I didn’t complain or order him down. He asked how come I was out on a Sunday morning and not getting ready for church. I told him about Caleb being sick again and in the Royal Children’s Hospital with Mum and Dad, and he said he was sorry and he hoped he got well soon.

Sadly for Teddy, he is what my dad calls ‘badly put together’. His very short, thick legs were bowed, so we teased him that we could see between his knees on a regular basis. He had a barrel chest and thick square hands with nails that were always black. His grandma cut his hair, and it stuck out in all directions. He had a double chin and very small grey eyes that sat warily beneath a large bone across his eyebrows that looked like a ridge. Ruthy said it made him look like a Neanderthal, which means ancient stone age man or something like that. He smelled of unwashed clothes and sour milk.

Most kids wouldn’t go into his place because it looked abandoned and a bit scary. There were two old cars in the front yard that clearly didn’t work because they were rusty and had plants growing out of them, and plastic bags of rubbish on the seats. There wasn’t a garden really, just a track where the weeds were flattened by Teddy’s boots. The paint was peeling everywhere and there were nests in the drainpipes and even some small trees growing out of them. Inside was very dark and smelled of dust and old food and wee and garlic, which lots of New Australians liked to eat, but which is very stinky and tastes funny. There were old pieces of furniture everywhere, and piles and piles of books and papers. Teddy said his gran didn’t like to throw things out. I’d been there a couple of times and I thought it was good on the inside even if a bit rough on the outside.

He said what was good about living with his gran was that he never had to make his bed or change his sheets. She didn’t go into his room so he had plenty of privacy to do his own projects. And what the other kids didn’t know, because they would never visit him and he would never tell them, was that he made the most beautiful model planes you have ever seen. They hung from his ceiling on little hooks he put up himself with his gran’s old ladder. He spent hours and hours on them. His desk, if you could give the old trestle table that grand title, was covered in tiny pieces of models, small tins of paints and pots of brushes. Everywhere else in his house was filthy except this desk, which was organised into categories and very clean. He said you couldn’t afford to get dust in your work or it ruined the final product. I suggested he take some of his planes to school to show people how talented he was, but he just shrugged and said they would only claim someone else had made them.